At Grizzly Grizzly, two worlds collide for a solo exhibition by San Francisco artist Margo Wolowiec. At this Knight Arts grantee, threads of the fabric and digital variety abound in a show that traces the maddeningly complicated streams of consciousness that twist and turn around every corner of the internet. Instead of text and other forms of data, however, Wolowiec returns to a medium that is analog through-and-through by translating messages and updates into woven matrices.

Margo Wolowiec, “One Day of Status Updates.”

Of Wolowiec’s works, almost all are composed by stitching the accumulated digital diaries and diatribes onto canvas, creating a tumble of words, phrases and letters that are at times quite difficult to decipher. And while the soft, physical medium of cloth seems at odds with the messages’ origins, the artist often renders them in bluish thread on a whitish field, calling to mind the color schemes of the Twitter and Facebook websites – two of the obvious heavy hitters as far as statuses and social media go.

Margo Wolowiec, “Conversation Series.”

For “One Day of Status Updates,” the march of text that was woven, unwoven and rewoven across the canvas forms a blue-gray circle of characters that seem simultaneously fabricated and spontaneous. The words ebb and flow in a cloud of characters and, slowly but surely, recognizable but nonsensical terms pop out from the chaos to assemble a narrative that is as obtuse as it is wholly subjective: ‘jolt & bolt,’ ‘stuck inside,’ ‘the democrats are the new republicans,’ ‘I need your beautiful voice.’ No individual can actually attempt to piece together what these chunks of thought may originally have meant, but surrendering to their lack of context is somewhat liberating.

Margo Wolowiec, still from the video “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.”

Elsewhere, Wolowiec includes a “Conversation Series” of more abstract shapes and patterns as well as a pair of videos entitled “10 tries at a square” and “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.” In the two videos, the artist’s hand is clearly visible as she attempts to ‘draw’ a perfect square with a piece of thread ten times, and obviously fails. It is fun to imagine that, given enough attempts and infinite time, eventually she would succeed. Perhaps this is an exercise in futility, but it is entertaining to watch. The alphabet piece follows much the same formula, but with the letters of the alphabet instead.

Wolowiec tackles the beast of the Internet through its inherently social nature, and comes back from the other side as confounded and overwhelmed as one might assume. The amount of data uploaded to the internet and shared between users on a daily basis is staggering and mind-boggling. Margo Wolowiec seems to find just the right balance between the digital and the tangible to convey both the wonderment and frustration that this new frontier of communication conjures.

Grizzly Grizzly is located at 319 North 11th St., on the second floor, Philadelphia; [email protected]; grizzlygrizzly.com.